This invention relates generally to vehicle seats and more particularly to rear seats for all purpose vehicles and the like.
All purpose vehicles, particularly minivans are becoming increasingly popular because they offer great variety in seating configuration for maximizing passenger or cargo transport or providing any desired combination in between. The variety and changability of the seating configuration is enhanced by the use of individual rear passenger seats that are storable in the vehicle as well as removable from the vehicle easily.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,700,989 granted to Jose A. Ercilla Oct. 20, 1987 discloses a storable and removable rear vehicle seat that is popularly referred to as a "flip and fold" seat because the seat back is folded down onto the seat which is then flipped up for storage or removal.
More specifically, the Ercilla seat arrangement has front and rear forks that support the seat on four mounting pins that are recessed in the vehicle floor and manually operable latching arrangements for latching the forks on the mounting pins. The front forks and the rear forks have separate latching arrangements so that the rear forks can be unlatched while the front forks remain latched to flip the seat up for storage in an upright or vertical position.
The Ercilla rear seat arrangement includes a control rod system for locking the manually operable front latching mechanism so that the front latching mechanism cannot be unlatched unless the seat is in the upright stored position in the vehicle. This assures that the front latching mechanism is not unlatched unintentionally. However, this control rod system is complicated and costly.
Furthermore, the Ercilla rear seat arrangement does not include any system for assuring that the manually operable rear latching mechanism is not unlatched unintentionally.
Moreover, Ercilla rear seat arrangement does not have a lift assist mechanism for flipping the seat up to the stored position although there are known lift assist mechanisms that are complicated and costly.